Meanderings about Prisoners of Conscience

Today they're showing the semi-finals of the Australian Open in a few minutes so I don't have much time to write til later. (Before I was a semi-professional dog agility competitor, I was a semi-professional tennis player!)

I picked Prisoners of Conscience as my first episode because of its themes: Conscience, Responsibility, Morality, Good and Evil, and Honor. (If I had footnotes, I'd put this in one: There's also clearly the theme of fathers and sons, but I won't comment on that because I don't quite understand the obsession men have with their fathers.) The backdrop of this episode is the policy of the American intelligence community, and thus its overall foreign policy.

The Chilean poet Antonio, who has become very close friends with the American professor (English? Film studies?) Waldo Jerrell, is kidnapped off the street in front of Waldo. Of course Waldo turns to McCall to help find Antonio. When a picture of Antonio with a black ribbon tied around it is found in his otherwise empty apartment, McCall recognizes the calling card of Randall Payne, the man who killed McCall's father thirty years before and whom McCall tracked for 20 years until the Company told him that Payne was dead. He meets with Control to ask how Payne could still be alive, and finds out that the Company had been using Payne's organization, known as CNI (a Blackwater-like group? unclear), for the last 10 years and that he is now involved in Chile.

For several seasons, we have heard about McCall's past actions in Chile. In "Prelude" (first episode of the second season) it comes to light that McCall helped organize and execute a coup which resulted in the fall of the elected government and put a brutal dictator into power. This is an allusion to the CIA's involvement in the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile and its backing for many years of the dictator Pinochet. In "Prelude", an American journalist is tortured in an attempt on the part of the Astice (sp?) (=Pinochet) government to find who might be undermining its rule. Control says in that episode that the dictator is trying to stabilize the country before human rights can be taken care of; if you've lived in the US long enough, you've heard this argument many times by government officials. Ironically, this is the same argument made by Control in "Prisoners of Conscience" to justify the Company's using Payne's organization, but it is two years later. Nothing has changed.

It is evident that the US government is condoning the actions of Payne. So who is Payne? (It's kind of silly that his name is Payne, since what he inflicts is pain, but we'll leave that one alone.) It seems to me that he is a representative of Evil, although there is certainly no consensus on the show whether Evil as a malevolent force exists, or if it is evil, the bad that men do. More on this soon.